Main: Unity Centers

The IFS is a localized and self-contained approach to dealing with biological waste.

OVF's idea is the IFS that it can be used as a way to minimize water use in water scarce environments. These projects would serve as educational tools to demonstrate how one could create a built environment that is highly productive agriculturally but is designed to recycle its water. Irrigation would be confined to greenhouses in arid environments and the living machine with ponds would also be enclosed to minimize water loss. All outdoor landscapes would be xeriscapes that is designed to exist mostly on natural rainfall, except in extreme drought conditions. All waste water produce within the Multipurpose Center would be recycled through a series of closed loop agricultural and industrial systems.
* Designed to simply utilize water above the ground.

• Obtained from the utilization of fuel cells as power sources.

In theory one could use the waste biomass collected from the surrounding areas both urban and rural to run the fuel cell by creating methane through the digester. The methane would otherwise be released into the atmosphere through the decay of organic matter adding to global warming. Methane is a greenhouse gas that is at least 10 times more potent than CO2.

Fuel Cells have what in Ecological Design is called Multi-use Properties which can be used to create Synergistic Feedback Loops. This simply means that they do more than one thing which can help to reduce their cost, as well as minimize environmental costs. They produce not only water but heat, carbon dioxide water and of course electricity.

As we develop ecological design as a field and a practical science we begin to see byproducts not as potential pollutants but as feedstocks for value added products. CO2 instead of being released into the environment and causing global warming can actually be piped into the greenhouse from the fuel cell to increase plant growth--Carbon Sequestration.

This model is revolutionary because it is an integrated approach to sustainability that is also relatively simple and elegant, and most importantly it can be applied to help reduce people's dependence on highly centralized economic and social systems, while providing with a practical alternative to American/Western consumerism and World Bank/IMF development models that are suitable to both the third world and the first world as well.